User Agent and Assistive Technology Support Notes

Description

The objective of this technique is to programmatically associate captions
for DataGrids where captions are provided in the presentation. Normally,
the caption for a table is a table identifier and acts like a title
or heading for the table.

Flash does not have a caption element for the DataGrid component,
but the same effect can be achieved through the following approach:

Place a label component or textfield above the DataGrid, containing
the grid's caption text.

Duplicate the caption text and add it as the grid's accessible
name. This can either be achieved by setting a value to the grid's "name" field
in the accessibility panel or by setting the grid's AccessibilityProperties.name
property.

Examples

Example 1: Associating a label with a datagrid

This is an example of a datagrid being added to the stage in Flash
Professional from the Components panel. A label element is also added
from the components panel to contain the caption text and the caption
text is used in the accessibility control panel in Flash to serve as
the accessibility name for the datagrid.

Create a new Flash file (.fla) or open an existing one to put
a datagrid into.

Open the Flash components panel from the Window menu

Drag a datagrid component onto the stage and position as desired.

Drag a label component onto the stage and position as desired.

Add text to the label component.

Select the datagrid component and add the same text as is used
in the label component to the name field for datagrid, using the
accessibility control panel.

Example 2: Associating a caption with a datagrid using ActiveScript 3

This is a basic AS3 example of a datagrid generated through scripting.
Additionally a label element is created, containing the caption text,
and the caption text is added to the grid as an accessible name.

The accessible name can also be applied to the DataGrid using
the Accessibility panel in the Flash authoring tool.

In the above example, the text used for the dataGrid caption will
be read twice, once as the text label that is offered for sighted
users, and again as the accessible name for the dataGrid. Authors
can avoid duplicate voicing by setting the silent property for the
label text to true.

Related Techniques

Tests

Procedure

Check whether the Flash movie contains a DataGrid component.

Confirm that each DataGrid's caption text has been added to the component as an accessible name.

Expected Results

Step 2 is true.

If this is a sufficient technique for a success criterion, failing this test procedure does not necessarily mean that the success criterion has not been satisfied in some other way, only that this technique has not been successfully implemented and can not be used to claim conformance.